Energy budget constraints on climate response

New study in Nature Geoscience A new analysis, looking at temperature rise in the most recent decades, has shown that following rapid heating in the late 20th century the Earth warmed only slowly in the last decade, partly as a result of natural cycles in the climate system. The study, resulting from an international collaboration of climate scientists, suggests that the Earth will warm more slowly over the current century than previously thought, so allowing a little more time to cut emissions and prevent dangerous climate change. "If previous estimates [of how the climate will warm] were true, keeping the world below 2 °C would have been almost impossible however big our emission cuts," says IAGP Principal Investigator and Co-author of the study, Piers Forster. "Now it looks like we have a chance, so we should take it." Link to journal article in Nature Geoscience, doi:10.1038/ngeo1836 Link to article in New Scientist 'A second chance to save the climate'.